Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday November 12, 2012 @02:55PM
from the coming-soon dept.

dotarray writes "Valve's Gabe Newell has confirmed that they are building the Source 2 engine, but haven't yet had the game to roll it out with. From the article: 'If you're not smiling yet, you'll definitely be doing so after you hear how the announcement was made. It was Gabe Newell's birthday on November 3rd, and 4Chan's /v/ (videogames) board decided to pay him a surprise visit. In addition to an enormous birthday card signed by many of /v/'s regulars, they also gave him an an actual Mann-Co crate, which he had to pay $2.50 to unlock in order to receive the gift of a combat helmet similar to the one worn by the Team Fortress 2 soldier. Irony at its best.'"

Valve hasn't had a Half-Life game since the Orange Box made its way to consoles. I don't think that is a coincidence. I think Valve realized that current-gen consoles are limited. They had to squeeze Source onto existing hardware, and it didn't leave much room for innovation.

I think what you're going to see is Valve negotiate with Sony and Microsoft with the next-gen of consoles in the 2013 holiday season. Either they allow Steam to operate on their networks and consoles directly, or Valve comes to market w

They may be loosely related NOW, but one could predict that there might be a crossing of plot-arcs in HL3. Episode 2 seems to imply that players will soon be visiting the Borealis, which may or may not contain a trip to a testing chamber of some kind. Will we meet GlaDOS? Probably not. But if I had to guess, I'd think that we'll be seeing a lot more than references to Aperture Science in Half Life 3.

That's not really true at all; according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], CounterStrike hit beta 4 before Valve got involved, and didn't fully acquire (2000) it until after its first release (1999).

By contrast, while Narbacular Drop was the genesis of Portal, Valve hired that team before development of Portal really began. Narbacular Drop is an impressive student project -- but as an actually published game it'd be pretty awful. The ideas were developed quite a bit for Portal beyond what Narbacular Drop did.

"Portal is Narbacular Drop" in true only in the same sense that, say, "HL1 is Doom" is true.

Yet Doom and Half Life were not developed by the same team, I understand it's not the same case with Gearbox because they're not owned by valve.
Opposing force was an amazing game that not many people played, so it's a shame to see it abandoned like that.

Please, please, please, please, please let the portal gun exist in multi-player, except you only control one side of the portal. Holding control of one half is exclusive to holding control of the other. Comedy effin' gold.

Depends. Bill is dead, after all, so it could mean the original group from L4D1 in a new setting. Or not. Hell, I'm so deep in corpses in Borderlands 2 right now I really can't remember what the beloved yet aged Half-Life series played like so even if it's that - right now? Meh.

Seriously a class action lawsuit is a shakedown? It costs them money? Both can be true, but limiting the consumer's legal choices is also a shakedown that ends up costing the consumer individually, which is what a class action is meant to protect against.

That is seemingly less and less likely.By now Gabe hates three is obviously not just a stupid joke. They must being trying to not make games with 3 in their name, because the likely hood of it going on this long just by change is too big.

My money is on Half life 2, Episode 2, Part 2 for the next game they release.

Honestly dont really care. Valve has been so lackluster with committment to completion since HL2 that I've ceased caring about their releases. If it releases, it releases, but I dont pay attention or anticipate it. Better things to do.'

It's like the opposite problem that 3DRealms had with Duke Nukem 4. Whereas the guy leading 3DRealms was overly committed to just this one game, and killed it by constantly insisting it had to include every new feature under the sun....Valve has a guy who cant committ to fini

this will be the first time Valve creates a game or engine that doesn't result in massive headaches and nausea for a segment of the population....

I am someone who gets motion sickness easy, and none of valve games have ever done that to me. In fact, I've never even heard that was an issue, until you said something, so I think you are making it up.

You realize the Source Engine came out EIGHT years ago, right? It was pretty freaking awesome when it came out. They've added a few incremental updates, since then, but it's in bad need of an overhaul at this point.

Source was never "awesome". idtech4 came out before it, for christ's sake.

Source is saddled with tiny maps/levels that are exceedingly slow to load. The graphics are OK but seem to require hardware that is capable of producing much better results using other engines like CryEngine or UE3. Finally, and this is changing now, but it was targeted way too strongly into DirectX.

idTech 4 is from 2004, the same year Source was released. Not only that, but idTech 4 was saddled with one of the shittiest FPS games in recent memory: Doom 3.

As for the other engines you mention, all of them are newer than Source, so it's not surprising that they would look better. As a reminder, UE3 was introduced with Unreal Tournament 3 in 2007. Crytek was introduced with Crysis in 2008.

Then again, if you're saying Source is bad, you may want to look at newer games made in it, such as Portal 2, rath

I have a feeling:1. The are going to focus on OpenGL with this engine. They've already ported much of their Source engine to Mac and now Linux. I just have a feeling that they are going to go ALL-IN on OpenGL this time so it is completely platform independent. I think it'll even have a Source 2 - Mobile Edition Engine for iPhones and Android devices. They want to be able to have their games/interface on all aspects of desktop and mobile computing environments. One engine to rule them all.

2. I think that they work with a partner manufacturer to release a Steam Box. They've not only created Steam Linux, but they've created a "Big Picture" button for easy viewing/navigation from the living room. They want to compete against the PS3 and the XBox. If they can create a distro and/or sell a little linux box themselves for the living room, they'll do it. There's huge potential for the living room.

3. With this push of these two huge ventures listed above, what better way to draw excitement than to release Half-Life 3, Portal 3, Counter-Strike 3, Left 4 Dead 3, and Team Fortress 3 all at the same time.

There's a reason Source has been lagging behind some of the other engines lately as well as games that should have been released a long time ago. They have huge plans in the pipeline that have me very excited, but it's taking a lot of retooling and coordinating. It's definitely not as trivial as updating the engine for DirectX 11 features.

The early source engine games were modded by recompiling a dll but afaict since source 2009 (the first version with mac support) the source needed to do that is no longer released. Later source games introduced scripting functionality but afaict it's really designed for putting small ammounts of inteligence into a level, not building new enemies, weapons etc.